European and American overseas integrated marketing companies, joined forces with Alibaba Cloud to hold the annual game overseas marketing summit, inviting well-known companies in the industry including IGN, Sensor Tower, Blueberry and other fields to share their experiences. Through this summit, NewCode hopes to allow major manufacturers to gain insight into the future trends of the overseas market.

Ada liu founder of Blueberry — Ada Liu, co-founder and CEO of Blueberry

At the summit, Ada Liu, co-founder and CEO of Blueberry, delivered a wonderful speech titled "Analysis and Case Sharing of Art Style Differences in Game Globalization", analyzing the differences of art design in different markets and different user groups for the guests.

Differences, the speech is divided into two major themes: one is how to obtain a better conversion rate through localized art design, and the other is how to make good game art design.

Blueberry is a hyper-growth design startup based in San Francisco founded in 2018. In the past year, they have participated in many famous games such as Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Diablo, World of Warcraft and Marvel games to name a few.

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Blueberry also provides a High-quality design platform and full-process design project management software, allowing employers to develop and book the world's top artists.

The following is the main content of this sharing:

1. Understand who the target users are and what they want.

Ada Liu said that in terms of age, young users are generally more inclined to faster-paced storylines and cartoon-like, brightly colored art designs. For example, the match-3 game "Best Fiends", or the movie "Tron" with extremely strong sensory stimulation and high-detailed art design. In contrast, older users are more receptive to historical, deeper, slower-paced narratives, as well as art designs with humanistic elements.

In addition, from a regional perspective, if a game chooses to be released in Asia, its character design, whether male or female, requires exquisite faces, slender thighs, and exaggerated body proportions, such as NetEase's "Onmyoji" ” and Tencent’s “Honor of Kings”. In contrast, European and American users prefer characters with normal proportions and a more muscular look, such as Blizzard’s “Overwatch” and Microsoft’s “Halo”. Science fiction themes are also popular in European and American markets

We need to understand the product features and visually present the game features in a way that the target users want to see.

A mistake that many designers often make is that they only focus on designing good-looking pictures and fail to effectively convey the characteristic gameplay of the game through design. Its design is also disconnected from the aesthetic preferences of the target user group.

Understanding the characteristics of a game and presenting it to the target user group through visual design is very important in art design. If developers want to obtain a better conversion rate, visual designs such as Apple and Google store screenshots, UA ads, etc. need to be presented in a way that target users want to see. For example, the MOBA product "Eternal Arena", which focuses on the European and American markets, uses a magical theme style in its art design that is more in line with European and American preferences. Through these UA designs, we can also clearly see the gameplay of 3v3 team battles.

The basis for the selection is that after research, it was found that most of the users who play "Eternal Arena" on the market are between the ages of 20-35. They are very hardcore players and play for an average of 1-2 hours a day. This group of users often wants more social interaction and connections in real life. Therefore, in the game, what they mainly seek is a strong sense of team belonging. Therefore, in terms of visual expression, we fully emphasized this sense of teamwork and team belonging. The core gameplay of 3V3 team battles is presented in a way that target users want to see.

Therefore, the design of excellent conversion rate mainly presents the content that the target user group wants to see and combines it with the content they want to see to highlight the gameplay and characteristics of the game.

To get better conversion rates, marketers often need to conduct effective A/B testing - testing several different designs in the Google Play prediction function. However, designers often submit two completely different designs. As a result, after the test results come out, the entire team has no clue. "Why is the test data of one group better than the other?" "What will we do in the next test?" Learn from previous test results?”

So for efficient testing, what we need to do is the control variable method.

Only one test variable is modified at a time. For example, for the first time, when the design is completely consistent, only the market keywords of the store screenshots are modified; after getting the keywords with excellent results, only the male and female characters are modified for the second time; after getting excellent results, the third time, only modify in-game screenshots, etc. After each test result comes out, I am good at summarizing the data results and doing visual analysis to find out which part of the visual information affects the test results.

2. How to make game products with good art design

We just talked a lot about how to get better game conversion rates. However, everyone knows better about marketing. If you promote a product of poor quality, no matter how high the marketing budget is, user retention will drop after a few days. If the product quality is good, the energy spent on marketing sometimes does not need to be very high.

Therefore, to maximize the game conversion rate, we need to go back and look at how to do product game art. What kind of product game art is loved by the target user group?

For many domestic first-tier game companies, the marketing department only gets involved after the game is ready. But marketers often have a good understanding of the user preferences of their target market. The best way is to involve the market in the early stages of game planning. Provide product managers with sufficient information about the preferences of players in the target market.

3. Understand the product budget

Ada pointed out that art production costs generally account for 30%-40% of the total game production budget. Generally speaking, cost expenditures are best calculated in weekly units. One month is divided into four weeks, and extrapolated back based on the budget, how much content must be completed each week;

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Some game categories require relatively high budgets because of the high quality of art. For example, SLG, card games, etc. It is best not to choose this type of gameplay as product design if you have a small budget. Small-budget products often need to streamline the storyline, and a storyline that can be explained clearly in one sentence is the best.

And generally speaking, the art design needs to be darker, so that many design flaws can be hidden, and many model reuses will not be easily discovered. For example, the lighting in the first Lord of the Rings was relatively dim, and the art design of The Hobbit movie, because the special effects budget was very high, all designs were relatively bright.

All the detailed designs are in place; it is not advisable to make too many experiments and attempts with a small budget because too many attempts in art design mean there are more risks of unsuccessful attempts, which will quickly burn out the budget. Using real life as a reference is the most direct and quick method; for low-budget projects, it is very important to plan which materials need to be reused; small team members often need to wear multiple hats. Large teams often have a very fine division of labor. For example, a scene texture designer only does substance design throughout the year. The design results will be excellent, but the cost will also increase a lot.

If the budget is high, a cycle of 3-5 years can be used. It is suitable for larger team sizes and mainly produces more complex and medium-to-severe game types. Team members are highly professional and dedicated.

More experimental designs can be done. And you can choose some more challenging themes, such as far-future science fiction, etc. Therefore, a good art design must have a clear product budget, a story background that conforms to the game theme, and a basic art style. Finally, it is necessary to create accurate art content based on the background style setting of the era and location. These are all the essential production steps and prerequisites for a game product with good art design. Do not forget to try the blueberry free trail !

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